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Crisp Air, No Crowds: 5 Southern Colorado Fall Day Trips With Kids

Sep 16, 2026
•
1 min read

By the last week of September the state foliage report turns half of Park County orange, and the Saturday after that, Guanella Pass Road backs up before nine in the morning. Everybody who has seen an aspen photo is pointed at the same eight mountain corridors. Southbound I-25 stays open the entire time.

The cold mornings and the long gold afternoon light people drive into the mountains for happen down south too. They happen over ranchland and cottonwood bottoms instead of over a pass with a famous name, so nobody photographs them and nobody queues for them. If you want the aspens anyway, there are five spots to catch Colorado's first fall colors that keep the drive manageable. This guide goes the other direction.

Five stops below, running from Colorado Springs into the San Luis Valley, all of them covered by a GetOut Colorado membership. Three sit entirely indoors, which counts for more in October than most families plan for. The last one keeps alligators alive at 7,500 feet by means that take a paragraph to explain.

Why Southern Colorado Gets Easier Once the Weather Turns

The monsoon ends. From mid-July into early September the Front Range runs on a fixed daily schedule, with clear mornings, clouds piling up around noon, and a thunderstorm sitting overhead somewhere between one and three. That pattern falls apart by late September, and what replaces it is a long dry stable day you can plan against.

Then there's the temperature swing, which is bigger down there than anywhere else in the state and works entirely in your favor. Pueblo sits at 4,692 feet. Alamosa sits at about 7,544. In late September the valley drops into the 30s overnight and climbs back into the low 70s by mid-afternoon. You get a morning cold enough that everybody wants a jacket and an afternoon warm enough that nobody wears one, on the same day, which almost never lines up in July.

Crowds are the other piece. Leaf traffic concentrates on maybe eight corridors statewide, and none of them run through Pueblo, Colorado Springs or the San Luis Valley. A Saturday in October down there moves at the pace of a Tuesday. Families who would rather stay close to the metro can work from five foothill spots west of Denver instead, all of them inside an hour.

Color also lasts longer. Valley ranch country and the cottonwoods along the Arkansas hold well into mid-October, weeks after high-country aspens have gone bare.

How Far Is Each Stop?

  • Main Event – Colorado Springs — about 1 hour 10 minutes from Denver, 15 minutes from Colorado Springs
  • American Paintball Coliseum — about 1 hour 20 minutes from Denver, 15 minutes from Colorado Springs
  • D-BAT Colorado Springs — about 1 hour 15 minutes from Denver, 15 minutes from Colorado Springs
  • Pueblo Weisbrod Aircraft Museum — about 1 hour 50 minutes from Denver, 45 minutes from Colorado Springs
  • Colorado Gators Reptile Park — about 4 hours from Denver, 3 hours from Colorado Springs

The first four work as day trips from anywhere on the Front Range. The fifth wants an overnight.

1. Main Event – Colorado Springs

1180 InterQuest Parkway, Colorado Springs, CO 80921

Start here when you've got a wide age spread and at least one kid who will come apart if the day involves standing quietly in a museum.

The InterQuest building holds bowling lanes, a multi-level laser tag arena, an arcade running past a hundred games, billiards, virtual reality, a gravity ropes course, and a full restaurant. A nine-year-old can be doing laser tag while a teenager vanishes into the arcade and a four-year-old bowls with bumpers up. Everyone comes back to a table when they get hungry.

What earns it a place on a fall list rather than a summer one is the cold snap. Southern Colorado's first real freeze tends to land in the back half of October, and it shows up without much warning. Having somewhere fully indoors that opens at ten and is already paid for takes the pressure off a forecast that collapses on Friday night. There's a longer list of indoor adventures for kids in Colorado worth keeping on your phone for the weekends when that happens.

Plan your visit: Doors open at 10 a.m. most days, 9 a.m. Saturdays, and the place runs late into the evening. With GetOut: once a quarter (1x Quarterly). That's the most generous frequency of anything in this guide, enough to turn it into a seasonal habit.

Pair it with: InterQuest sits on the far north edge of Colorado Springs. Garden of the Gods is twenty minutes away, costs nothing to walk into, and looks better under a low autumn sun than it does at noon in July.

2. American Paintball Coliseum – Colorado Springs

834 Emory Circle, Colorado Springs, CO 80915

This is the only indoor paintball field in Colorado, and October is when that stops being a trivia fact and starts being the reason you go.

The arena runs paintball, airsoft, laser tag and axe throwing under one roof. For families, the laser tag setup is the piece worth knowing about. It skips the chest rigs and headbands that make the standard version miserable for small kids, so a seven-year-old can play against a fifteen-year-old without wearing gear built for somebody twice their size. Airsoft opens up at age 10.

The fields are built as urban spaces with corridors, obstacles and blind corners rather than an open lot with bunkers scattered around. Staff walk first-timers through check-in and safety rules before anybody steps on, and supervise throughout.

Plan your visit: Indoor fields run Monday to Friday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday hours move around, so call before you build a Sunday on it. Book ahead if you're bringing a group. Long sleeves and closed-toe shoes. With GetOut: once a year (1x Yearly).

Pair it with: Emory Circle sits on the east side near the airport, fifteen minutes from downtown Colorado Springs, with a clean shot down I-25 toward Pueblo if you're stringing stops together.

3. D-BAT Colorado Springs

8265 Jamboree Circle, Colorado Springs, CO 80920

Narrower than the rest, and the one to skip if nobody in your house plays ball. For families where somebody does, it answers a question that comes up every October.

Youth baseball and softball wrap up, the fields go cold, and a kid who spent all summer swinging has nowhere to put that energy for six months. The membership also covers a family day at a Colorado Rapids match, which runs later into the fall than baseball does.

D-BAT is indoors and climate-controlled, with automated cages that throw real baseballs and softballs instead of the dimpled practice balls most public cages use. Cages rent in half-hour blocks. Machine lanes work first-come.

Autumn is when travel-ball families start filling the place up to keep swings alive through the winter. Going in October, before lesson slots book solid, gets you a quieter building and more time on a machine.

Plan your visit: Monday to Friday from noon to 9 p.m., Saturday noon to 6 p.m., Sunday 12:30 to 6 p.m. Bring a helmet and bat if you own them. With GetOut: once a year (1x Yearly).

Pair it with: Jamboree Circle is ten minutes from Main Event, so the two of them fold into a single afternoon without much driving in between.

4. Pueblo Weisbrod Aircraft Museum

31001 Magnuson Avenue, Pueblo, CO 81001

The best value on this list by a wide margin, and the stop most Front Range families have never heard anybody mention.

It sits on the old Pueblo Army Air Base, which trained heavy bomber crews through the Second World War and was among the largest facilities of its kind in the country. Two hangars plus the outdoor space cover better than 85,000 square feet and hold something like forty aircraft, along with military ground vehicles, missiles and artifacts reaching back to the First World War.

Two things make it land with kids in a way most museums don't. You can walk right up to the aircraft rather than looking at them from behind a rope. And the docents are volunteers, a lot of them former military or aviation people, who will stop what they're doing and explain an airframe to a ten-year-old who asks about it. The campus also holds the Southern Colorado Space Museum and Learning Center, with NASA exhibits and a STEM lab, plus the International B-24 Memorial Museum.

People show up planning to kill an hour and walk out three hours later. That comes up in visitor reviews over and over.

Plan your visit: Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Sunday afternoons. Adults pay $10, seniors 60 and over pay $8, veterans pay $8, active duty gets in free, and children under 7 come in free with a parent. Parking costs nothing. Nearly all of it is under a roof, so the forecast barely matters. With GetOut: once a year (1x Yearly).

Pair it with: The museum sits six miles east of downtown Pueblo. The Historic Arkansas Riverwalk handles lunch and a walk after, and the cottonwoods along the water go yellow through the first half of October.

5. Colorado Gators Reptile Park, Mosca

9162 Lane 9 North, Mosca, CO 81146

So, the alligators. There is an alligator farm in the San Luis Valley, at 7,500 feet, in a place where October nights go below freezing.

Geothermal water is how. A well on the property feeds ponds that stay warm year-round, which is why the Young family started raising tilapia out there in 1977. Ten years later they brought in a hundred baby alligators to deal with the fish waste. People kept sneaking onto the property to look at them, so in 1990 the family gave up and opened the gate.

What grew out of that is an 80-acre rescue. People turn over alligators, crocodiles, caimans, pythons, monitor lizards and tortoises they can no longer keep, and the park takes them in. Among the residents are albino alligators and Morris, who appeared in Happy Gilmore. Every visitor gets a chance to hold a small alligator. Catch-and-release fishing is free with paid admission if you brought your own gear.

Autumn is the time to make the drive. Steam comes off the geothermal ponds on a cold morning. The summer crowds heading for the Great Sand Dunes have thinned out by then, and the valley cottonwoods are turning.

Plan your visit: Open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. through November 1, then 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. for the winter. Admission runs $30 for ages 16 to 64, $15 for ages 6 to 15 and seniors 65 to 79, free for children 5 and under and for anyone 80 and over. Dress warmer than the forecast suggests, because the valley floor is flat and open and the wind has nothing to slow it down. You'll find the park 17 miles north of Alamosa on Highway 17. With GetOut: once a year (1x Yearly).

Pair it with: Great Sand Dunes National Park is about 25 minutes east, and climbing the tallest dunes in North America is a far better proposition in October than in July, when the sand surface can hit 150 degrees. A few miles north on Highway 17 near Hooper you'll find the UFO Watchtower, which is exactly what it sounds like.

Two Routes That Already Work

One day. Out of the metro by eight. Main Event or the paintball arena through late morning, lunch in Colorado Springs, then forty-five minutes south to the aircraft museum for the afternoon. Walk the Riverwalk before you point the car home.

One night. Saturday at the aircraft museum in Pueblo, sleep in Alamosa. Get to Colorado Gators early Sunday while steam is still rising off the ponds, then spend the afternoon at the Great Sand Dunes when the light goes long.

What to Throw in the Car

  • A real jacket for everybody. Forty degrees in the San Luis Valley feels nothing like forty degrees in Denver, because of the wind.
  • Water, more than you think. Dry air at altitude pulls it out of kids faster than parents notice.
  • Sunscreen, even in October. UV climbs about four percent for every thousand feet you gain.
  • A full tank before you leave Walsenburg or Salida. Gas stations get scarce once you're in the valley.
  • Closed-toe shoes for the paintball arena and the gravel at Colorado Gators.

What the GetOut Colorado Membership Covers

A GetOut Colorado membership costs $54.95 for the year against a $90 comp value, and it covers admission at 81+ venues and attractions around the state. You pay once, download the GetOut app, look at what's near you, and hold up your phone at the front desk when you arrive. There's a walkthrough on how to use your GetOut membership if you'd rather see the app side before you buy.

The arithmetic on this itinerary alone gets there fast. Ten dollars a head at the aircraft museum, $30 per adult and $15 per kid at Colorado Gators, an evening at Main Event, a paintball session. A family of four clears the annual cost inside two outings, which lines up with what members keep writing about the pass covering itself after a visit or two. It comes with 120 days risk-free, and families who want Elitch Gardens can move up to Membership + Premium Venues for $79.95 a year.

Venues set their own redemption frequency. Main Event resets every quarter. The other four reset once a year, which turns them into outings kids count down toward rather than something you default to every weekend.

If Your Fall Travel Keeps Going

GetOut runs memberships in more than 30 regions, and a few of them sit close enough to fold into a trip you already had planned.

Families heading south over Raton Pass are two hours from Santa Fe, and a GetOut New Mexico / West Texas membership covers that side of the line.

Go west over the divide instead and GetOut Utah picks up the canyon country, which stays comfortable deep into November.

Fall break travel that chases warm weather generally means Phoenix or Tucson, where GetOut Arizona does the work.

For anyone who drives east out of Denver on I-70 with any regularity, a GetOut Kansas City membership tends to pay for itself on the way back.

Colorado's color finishes early. Maples and oaks back east hold into the last week of October, which is the season GetOut New England is built around.

Southern Colorado Fall Trips: Common Questions

What is there to do in southern Colorado with kids in the fall? Colorado Springs has indoor entertainment centers, an indoor paintball and laser tag arena, and batting cages. Pueblo has an aviation museum with around forty aircraft, a space wing and a STEM lab. The San Luis Valley has an alligator rescue park and the Great Sand Dunes. All of it stays open through October, and none of it asks you to hike.

Is it worth driving to the San Luis Valley from Denver for a day? For one day, no. It's roughly four hours each way. Turn it into an overnight in Alamosa and pair Colorado Gators with the Great Sand Dunes, and it becomes one of the better weekends available in the state.

Where can I see alligators in Colorado? Colorado Gators Reptile Park in Mosca, 17 miles north of Alamosa on Highway 17. A geothermal well keeps the ponds warm all year, which is how alligators get through winter at 7,500 feet. Open daily from 9 to 5 through November 1.

What should we do in Pueblo with kids on a weekend? The Pueblo Weisbrod Aircraft Museum out at Pueblo Memorial Airport anchors the day. Two hangars, roughly forty aircraft, the Southern Colorado Space Museum, and volunteers who give real tours. Adults are $10 and kids under 7 get in free. Add the Historic Arkansas Riverwalk downtown afterward.

Are there fall activities in Colorado that don't involve hiking or leaf peeping? Every stop in this guide works without a trail. Three are indoors from the door. The aircraft museum and the reptile park both involve flat walking on level ground.

How cold does it get in the San Luis Valley in September and October? Overnight lows reach the 30s by late September and the 20s through October, while afternoons often climb into the 60s and low 70s. It's among the widest daily swings anywhere in Colorado, so pack for both ends of it.

What's the cheapest way to do a family weekend in southern Colorado? Put free public land together with a membership that picks up the paid attractions. Garden of the Gods, the Pueblo Riverwalk and national forest trails cost nothing to walk into. A GetOut membership then handles the museums and entertainment venues that would otherwise run $10 to $30 a head everywhere you stop.

Is a GetOut membership worth it if we only go a few times a year? At $54.95 for twelve months, two or three visits generally cover it. Colorado Gators by itself runs $90 at the gate for a family of four. There's a 120-day risk-free window if you'd rather test it across a season first.

Before the First Hard Freeze

Colorado Gators moves to winter hours on November 2, and valley nights start dropping below freezing well before that date. The aircraft museum and the Colorado Springs venues run all year. The version of this trip with warm afternoons and a valley full of yellow cottonwoods has a window on it, and the window is open now.

Get your GetOut Colorado membership and go use it while the weather is still on your side.

‍

By the last week of September the state foliage report turns half of Park County orange, and the Saturday after that, Guanella Pass Road backs up before nine in the morning. Everybody who has seen an aspen photo is pointed at the same eight mountain corridors. Southbound I-25 stays open the entire time.

The cold mornings and the long gold afternoon light people drive into the mountains for happen down south too. They happen over ranchland and cottonwood bottoms instead of over a pass with a famous name, so nobody photographs them and nobody queues for them. If you want the aspens anyway, there are five spots to catch Colorado's first fall colors that keep the drive manageable. This guide goes the other direction.

Five stops below, running from Colorado Springs into the San Luis Valley, all of them covered by a GetOut Colorado membership. Three sit entirely indoors, which counts for more in October than most families plan for. The last one keeps alligators alive at 7,500 feet by means that take a paragraph to explain.

Why Southern Colorado Gets Easier Once the Weather Turns

The monsoon ends. From mid-July into early September the Front Range runs on a fixed daily schedule, with clear mornings, clouds piling up around noon, and a thunderstorm sitting overhead somewhere between one and three. That pattern falls apart by late September, and what replaces it is a long dry stable day you can plan against.

Then there's the temperature swing, which is bigger down there than anywhere else in the state and works entirely in your favor. Pueblo sits at 4,692 feet. Alamosa sits at about 7,544. In late September the valley drops into the 30s overnight and climbs back into the low 70s by mid-afternoon. You get a morning cold enough that everybody wants a jacket and an afternoon warm enough that nobody wears one, on the same day, which almost never lines up in July.

Crowds are the other piece. Leaf traffic concentrates on maybe eight corridors statewide, and none of them run through Pueblo, Colorado Springs or the San Luis Valley. A Saturday in October down there moves at the pace of a Tuesday. Families who would rather stay close to the metro can work from five foothill spots west of Denver instead, all of them inside an hour.

Color also lasts longer. Valley ranch country and the cottonwoods along the Arkansas hold well into mid-October, weeks after high-country aspens have gone bare.

How Far Is Each Stop?

  • Main Event – Colorado Springs — about 1 hour 10 minutes from Denver, 15 minutes from Colorado Springs
  • American Paintball Coliseum — about 1 hour 20 minutes from Denver, 15 minutes from Colorado Springs
  • D-BAT Colorado Springs — about 1 hour 15 minutes from Denver, 15 minutes from Colorado Springs
  • Pueblo Weisbrod Aircraft Museum — about 1 hour 50 minutes from Denver, 45 minutes from Colorado Springs
  • Colorado Gators Reptile Park — about 4 hours from Denver, 3 hours from Colorado Springs

The first four work as day trips from anywhere on the Front Range. The fifth wants an overnight.

1. Main Event – Colorado Springs

1180 InterQuest Parkway, Colorado Springs, CO 80921

Start here when you've got a wide age spread and at least one kid who will come apart if the day involves standing quietly in a museum.

The InterQuest building holds bowling lanes, a multi-level laser tag arena, an arcade running past a hundred games, billiards, virtual reality, a gravity ropes course, and a full restaurant. A nine-year-old can be doing laser tag while a teenager vanishes into the arcade and a four-year-old bowls with bumpers up. Everyone comes back to a table when they get hungry.

What earns it a place on a fall list rather than a summer one is the cold snap. Southern Colorado's first real freeze tends to land in the back half of October, and it shows up without much warning. Having somewhere fully indoors that opens at ten and is already paid for takes the pressure off a forecast that collapses on Friday night. There's a longer list of indoor adventures for kids in Colorado worth keeping on your phone for the weekends when that happens.

Plan your visit: Doors open at 10 a.m. most days, 9 a.m. Saturdays, and the place runs late into the evening. With GetOut: once a quarter (1x Quarterly). That's the most generous frequency of anything in this guide, enough to turn it into a seasonal habit.

Pair it with: InterQuest sits on the far north edge of Colorado Springs. Garden of the Gods is twenty minutes away, costs nothing to walk into, and looks better under a low autumn sun than it does at noon in July.

2. American Paintball Coliseum – Colorado Springs

834 Emory Circle, Colorado Springs, CO 80915

This is the only indoor paintball field in Colorado, and October is when that stops being a trivia fact and starts being the reason you go.

The arena runs paintball, airsoft, laser tag and axe throwing under one roof. For families, the laser tag setup is the piece worth knowing about. It skips the chest rigs and headbands that make the standard version miserable for small kids, so a seven-year-old can play against a fifteen-year-old without wearing gear built for somebody twice their size. Airsoft opens up at age 10.

The fields are built as urban spaces with corridors, obstacles and blind corners rather than an open lot with bunkers scattered around. Staff walk first-timers through check-in and safety rules before anybody steps on, and supervise throughout.

Plan your visit: Indoor fields run Monday to Friday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday hours move around, so call before you build a Sunday on it. Book ahead if you're bringing a group. Long sleeves and closed-toe shoes. With GetOut: once a year (1x Yearly).

Pair it with: Emory Circle sits on the east side near the airport, fifteen minutes from downtown Colorado Springs, with a clean shot down I-25 toward Pueblo if you're stringing stops together.

3. D-BAT Colorado Springs

8265 Jamboree Circle, Colorado Springs, CO 80920

Narrower than the rest, and the one to skip if nobody in your house plays ball. For families where somebody does, it answers a question that comes up every October.

Youth baseball and softball wrap up, the fields go cold, and a kid who spent all summer swinging has nowhere to put that energy for six months. The membership also covers a family day at a Colorado Rapids match, which runs later into the fall than baseball does.

D-BAT is indoors and climate-controlled, with automated cages that throw real baseballs and softballs instead of the dimpled practice balls most public cages use. Cages rent in half-hour blocks. Machine lanes work first-come.

Autumn is when travel-ball families start filling the place up to keep swings alive through the winter. Going in October, before lesson slots book solid, gets you a quieter building and more time on a machine.

Plan your visit: Monday to Friday from noon to 9 p.m., Saturday noon to 6 p.m., Sunday 12:30 to 6 p.m. Bring a helmet and bat if you own them. With GetOut: once a year (1x Yearly).

Pair it with: Jamboree Circle is ten minutes from Main Event, so the two of them fold into a single afternoon without much driving in between.

4. Pueblo Weisbrod Aircraft Museum

31001 Magnuson Avenue, Pueblo, CO 81001

The best value on this list by a wide margin, and the stop most Front Range families have never heard anybody mention.

It sits on the old Pueblo Army Air Base, which trained heavy bomber crews through the Second World War and was among the largest facilities of its kind in the country. Two hangars plus the outdoor space cover better than 85,000 square feet and hold something like forty aircraft, along with military ground vehicles, missiles and artifacts reaching back to the First World War.

Two things make it land with kids in a way most museums don't. You can walk right up to the aircraft rather than looking at them from behind a rope. And the docents are volunteers, a lot of them former military or aviation people, who will stop what they're doing and explain an airframe to a ten-year-old who asks about it. The campus also holds the Southern Colorado Space Museum and Learning Center, with NASA exhibits and a STEM lab, plus the International B-24 Memorial Museum.

People show up planning to kill an hour and walk out three hours later. That comes up in visitor reviews over and over.

Plan your visit: Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Sunday afternoons. Adults pay $10, seniors 60 and over pay $8, veterans pay $8, active duty gets in free, and children under 7 come in free with a parent. Parking costs nothing. Nearly all of it is under a roof, so the forecast barely matters. With GetOut: once a year (1x Yearly).

Pair it with: The museum sits six miles east of downtown Pueblo. The Historic Arkansas Riverwalk handles lunch and a walk after, and the cottonwoods along the water go yellow through the first half of October.

5. Colorado Gators Reptile Park, Mosca

9162 Lane 9 North, Mosca, CO 81146

So, the alligators. There is an alligator farm in the San Luis Valley, at 7,500 feet, in a place where October nights go below freezing.

Geothermal water is how. A well on the property feeds ponds that stay warm year-round, which is why the Young family started raising tilapia out there in 1977. Ten years later they brought in a hundred baby alligators to deal with the fish waste. People kept sneaking onto the property to look at them, so in 1990 the family gave up and opened the gate.

What grew out of that is an 80-acre rescue. People turn over alligators, crocodiles, caimans, pythons, monitor lizards and tortoises they can no longer keep, and the park takes them in. Among the residents are albino alligators and Morris, who appeared in Happy Gilmore. Every visitor gets a chance to hold a small alligator. Catch-and-release fishing is free with paid admission if you brought your own gear.

Autumn is the time to make the drive. Steam comes off the geothermal ponds on a cold morning. The summer crowds heading for the Great Sand Dunes have thinned out by then, and the valley cottonwoods are turning.

Plan your visit: Open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. through November 1, then 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. for the winter. Admission runs $30 for ages 16 to 64, $15 for ages 6 to 15 and seniors 65 to 79, free for children 5 and under and for anyone 80 and over. Dress warmer than the forecast suggests, because the valley floor is flat and open and the wind has nothing to slow it down. You'll find the park 17 miles north of Alamosa on Highway 17. With GetOut: once a year (1x Yearly).

Pair it with: Great Sand Dunes National Park is about 25 minutes east, and climbing the tallest dunes in North America is a far better proposition in October than in July, when the sand surface can hit 150 degrees. A few miles north on Highway 17 near Hooper you'll find the UFO Watchtower, which is exactly what it sounds like.

Two Routes That Already Work

One day. Out of the metro by eight. Main Event or the paintball arena through late morning, lunch in Colorado Springs, then forty-five minutes south to the aircraft museum for the afternoon. Walk the Riverwalk before you point the car home.

One night. Saturday at the aircraft museum in Pueblo, sleep in Alamosa. Get to Colorado Gators early Sunday while steam is still rising off the ponds, then spend the afternoon at the Great Sand Dunes when the light goes long.

What to Throw in the Car

  • A real jacket for everybody. Forty degrees in the San Luis Valley feels nothing like forty degrees in Denver, because of the wind.
  • Water, more than you think. Dry air at altitude pulls it out of kids faster than parents notice.
  • Sunscreen, even in October. UV climbs about four percent for every thousand feet you gain.
  • A full tank before you leave Walsenburg or Salida. Gas stations get scarce once you're in the valley.
  • Closed-toe shoes for the paintball arena and the gravel at Colorado Gators.

What the GetOut Colorado Membership Covers

A GetOut Colorado membership costs $54.95 for the year against a $90 comp value, and it covers admission at 81+ venues and attractions around the state. You pay once, download the GetOut app, look at what's near you, and hold up your phone at the front desk when you arrive. There's a walkthrough on how to use your GetOut membership if you'd rather see the app side before you buy.

The arithmetic on this itinerary alone gets there fast. Ten dollars a head at the aircraft museum, $30 per adult and $15 per kid at Colorado Gators, an evening at Main Event, a paintball session. A family of four clears the annual cost inside two outings, which lines up with what members keep writing about the pass covering itself after a visit or two. It comes with 120 days risk-free, and families who want Elitch Gardens can move up to Membership + Premium Venues for $79.95 a year.

Venues set their own redemption frequency. Main Event resets every quarter. The other four reset once a year, which turns them into outings kids count down toward rather than something you default to every weekend.

If Your Fall Travel Keeps Going

GetOut runs memberships in more than 30 regions, and a few of them sit close enough to fold into a trip you already had planned.

Families heading south over Raton Pass are two hours from Santa Fe, and a GetOut New Mexico / West Texas membership covers that side of the line.

Go west over the divide instead and GetOut Utah picks up the canyon country, which stays comfortable deep into November.

Fall break travel that chases warm weather generally means Phoenix or Tucson, where GetOut Arizona does the work.

For anyone who drives east out of Denver on I-70 with any regularity, a GetOut Kansas City membership tends to pay for itself on the way back.

Colorado's color finishes early. Maples and oaks back east hold into the last week of October, which is the season GetOut New England is built around.

Southern Colorado Fall Trips: Common Questions

What is there to do in southern Colorado with kids in the fall? Colorado Springs has indoor entertainment centers, an indoor paintball and laser tag arena, and batting cages. Pueblo has an aviation museum with around forty aircraft, a space wing and a STEM lab. The San Luis Valley has an alligator rescue park and the Great Sand Dunes. All of it stays open through October, and none of it asks you to hike.

Is it worth driving to the San Luis Valley from Denver for a day? For one day, no. It's roughly four hours each way. Turn it into an overnight in Alamosa and pair Colorado Gators with the Great Sand Dunes, and it becomes one of the better weekends available in the state.

Where can I see alligators in Colorado? Colorado Gators Reptile Park in Mosca, 17 miles north of Alamosa on Highway 17. A geothermal well keeps the ponds warm all year, which is how alligators get through winter at 7,500 feet. Open daily from 9 to 5 through November 1.

What should we do in Pueblo with kids on a weekend? The Pueblo Weisbrod Aircraft Museum out at Pueblo Memorial Airport anchors the day. Two hangars, roughly forty aircraft, the Southern Colorado Space Museum, and volunteers who give real tours. Adults are $10 and kids under 7 get in free. Add the Historic Arkansas Riverwalk downtown afterward.

Are there fall activities in Colorado that don't involve hiking or leaf peeping? Every stop in this guide works without a trail. Three are indoors from the door. The aircraft museum and the reptile park both involve flat walking on level ground.

How cold does it get in the San Luis Valley in September and October? Overnight lows reach the 30s by late September and the 20s through October, while afternoons often climb into the 60s and low 70s. It's among the widest daily swings anywhere in Colorado, so pack for both ends of it.

What's the cheapest way to do a family weekend in southern Colorado? Put free public land together with a membership that picks up the paid attractions. Garden of the Gods, the Pueblo Riverwalk and national forest trails cost nothing to walk into. A GetOut membership then handles the museums and entertainment venues that would otherwise run $10 to $30 a head everywhere you stop.

Is a GetOut membership worth it if we only go a few times a year? At $54.95 for twelve months, two or three visits generally cover it. Colorado Gators by itself runs $90 at the gate for a family of four. There's a 120-day risk-free window if you'd rather test it across a season first.

Before the First Hard Freeze

Colorado Gators moves to winter hours on November 2, and valley nights start dropping below freezing well before that date. The aircraft museum and the Colorado Springs venues run all year. The version of this trip with warm afternoons and a valley full of yellow cottonwoods has a window on it, and the window is open now.

Get your GetOut Colorado membership and go use it while the weather is still on your side.

‍

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Sep 16, 2026
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